Author of LOL here, if there are any questions!
What do you think about making a second edition?
Land of Lisp (2010)
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#22I bought this book years ago even though I had already been programming in Common Lisp for 20 years at that time. I really like Conrad Barski's writing and that was sufficient reason to buy the book.
"Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon" is also a very good book on Lisp.
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#23As someone that started learning lisp with this book I recommend not starting with this book, and instead reading Practical Common Lisp. Some of the tutorials in the book use some fairy awkward conventions (e.g. using lists of symbols to create strings). I enjoyed the book, but had to unlearn some things afterwards.
I thought it is to help to learn list manipulation. String is great but is a super coat. But I do agree this should not be the only book. In fact Piap is better. The whole Common Lisp learning is hindered by suddenly you have a function that do magic. And nil does not help. Really wish there is a lisp book learning using the kernel (lisp 1.5 which can be easily implemented using itself).
It's not a book, but there is Graham's short paper "The Roots of Lisp" - http://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html which is something of this sort: you can more or less implement something like lisp 1.5 in CL or elisp etc. following this paper.
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? ;) Maybe there are only ones you're not ready for yet... (I've been unsuccessfully searching for a hardcover of Art of the Metaobject Protocol for a while, I can make myself ready for it once I have it.) In HN tradition where we all recommend every book we've ever read similar to the submitted one (and Land of Lisp is worth reading), an overlooked recently published booklet I…
> is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? Yes, there exists a certain a really awful book from the 1980's about making your own Lisp in C, which has recently been reprinted in essentially its original form.
Oh that sounds exciting, what's it called?
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#25This book is well worn, dog eared, and on my home office book shelf. While many people criticize it, for legitimate reasons, it is still a fun and wonderful journey through Common Lisp. I wish more books were written in this irreverent and whimsical style. If however you want a more traditional and "from zero" introduction to Lisp, then "Common LISP - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation"[0] may be better. I…
If you like this sort of thing, here are some others in a similar humorous style for other languages. 1. Kaufman, Roger. A FORTRAN Coloring Book (probably the first funny programming book -- from 1978). 2. Lipovača, Miran. Learn You A Haskell for Great Good. 3. Hebert, Fred. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (inspired by the Haskell book). 4. Felleisen, Matthias. Realm of Racket (basically Land of Lisp for Racket.…
> nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure"
Higginbotham, Daniel. Clojure for the Brave and True.
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? ;) Maybe there are only ones you're not ready for yet... (I've been unsuccessfully searching for a hardcover of Art of the Metaobject Protocol for a while, I can make myself ready for it once I have it.) In HN tradition where we all recommend every book we've ever read similar to the submitted one (and Land of Lisp is worth reading), an overlooked recently published booklet I…
> is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? Yes, there exists a certain a really awful book from the 1980's about making your own Lisp in C, which has recently been reprinted in essentially its original form.
I nearly started working through that, would you mind sharing why you think it is a bad book? thx
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#27Author of LOL here, if there are any questions!
What do you think about making a second edition?
I would say "Realm of Racket" is really the second edition to "Land of Lisp"- The fact is that most lisp developers now use either Racket Scheme or Clojure, so those are really the only markets that could support a rework of LOL in 2019. I've tried a couple of times in the past to work with someone on a Clojure port, but just haven't been able to make the coauthor+publisher work out right to get it launched.
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think about making a second edition?
I would say "Realm of Racket" is really the second edition to "Land of Lisp"- The fact is that most lisp developers now use either Racket Scheme or Clojure, so those are really the only markets that could support a rework of LOL in 2019. I've tried a couple of times in the past to work with someone on a Clojure port, but just haven't been able to make the coauthor+publisher work out right to get it launched.
If you ever manage to get that off the ground and onto shelves, that would make me a very happy kiddo.
Thanks for writing one of the most enjoyable programming books out there.
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#29This book is well worn, dog eared, and on my home office book shelf. While many people criticize it, for legitimate reasons, it is still a fun and wonderful journey through Common Lisp. I wish more books were written in this irreverent and whimsical style. If however you want a more traditional and "from zero" introduction to Lisp, then "Common LISP - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation"[0] may be better. I…
If you like this sort of thing, here are some others in a similar humorous style for other languages. 1. Kaufman, Roger. A FORTRAN Coloring Book (probably the first funny programming book -- from 1978). 2. Lipovača, Miran. Learn You A Haskell for Great Good. 3. Hebert, Fred. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (inspired by the Haskell book). 4. Felleisen, Matthias. Realm of Racket (basically Land of Lisp for Racket.…
Starting Forth / Thinking Forth from Brodie are great too
They are now freely downloadable: http://www.exemark.com/FORTH/StartingFORTHfromForthWebsitev9... http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
Re: Land of Lisp (2010)
#30Author of LOL here, if there are any questions!
Hey Dr Barski. I'm actually reading your book right now. I do have a question. How do you write Lisp effectively? And by that I mean, Lisp seems to be written from the inside out due to the nested lists. Is there something that makes it more natural to write:
(trim-string (get-string '(some data)))
Or do you need to know that you're going to call trim before you get the string? Hope that makes sense.